The Moldable Editor

Abstract

We present a scalable and moldable text editor modelled as a single composition tree of visual elements. It allows us to mix text and graphical components in a transparent way and treat them uniformly. As a result we are able to augment code with views by using special adornment attributes that are applied on text by stylers as part of the syntax highlighting process. We validate the model by implementing a code editor capable of manipulating large pieces of text; the Transcript, a logging tool being able to display non-textual messages; the Connector, an example dependencies browser and the Documenter, an interactive and live editor of Pillar markup documents.